The Last Lovely City (11 page)

Several times in the course of that walking around Miles asked her, “But was there something particular you wanted to see? I could take you—”

“Oh no.” Her throaty voice hesitated. “Oh no, I just wanted to see—everything. The way we’re doing. And of course I wanted Jon to see it too.”

Miles asked her, “How about the cemetery? These days I know more people there than I do downtown.”

She laughed, but she told him, “Oh, great. Let’s do go and see the cemetery.”

Certainly Grace had been right about the season. The dogwood was just in bloom, white fountains spraying out against the
darker evergreens, and fragrant white or lavender wisteria, across the roofs of porches, over garden trellises. Jonquils and narcissus, in their tidy plots, bricked off from the flowing lawns. As Grace several times remarked, the air simply smelled of April. There was nothing like it, anywhere.

“You should come back more often,” Miles chided.

“I’m not sure I could stand it.” She laughed, very lightly.

The cemetery was old, pre–Civil War; many of the stones were broken, worn, the inscriptions illegible. But there were new ones too, that both Grace and Miles recognized, and remarked upon.

“Look at those Sloanes, they were always the tackiest people. Oh, the Berryhills, they must have struck it rich. And the Calvins, discreet and tasteful as always. Lord, how could there be so many Strouds?”

It was Jonathan who finally said, “Now I see the point of cemeteries. Future entertainment.”

They all laughed. It was perhaps the high point of their afternoon, the moment at which they all liked each other best.

And then Grace pointed ahead of them, and she said, “Well for God’s sake, there they are. Why did I think I could miss them, totally?”

An imposing granite stone announced
LAFFERTY
, and underneath, in more discreet lettering, Hortense and Thomas. With dates.

Grace shuddered. “Well, they won’t get me in there. Not with them. I’m going to be cremated and have the ashes scattered off Malibu. Or maybe in Central Park.”

Five o’clock. Already they were a little late. It was time to go for tea, or rather to be there. Grace had taken even longer than usual with makeup, with general fussing, though Jonathan had reminded her, “At ninety-two she may not see too well, you know.”

“Nevertheless.” But she hadn’t laughed.

Miles lived in a small house just across the street from Miss Dabney’s much larger, grander house. It was thus that they knew each other. As Grace and Jonathan drove up he was out in front poking at leaves, but actually just waiting for them, as they all knew.

“I’m sorry—” Grace began.

“It’s all right, but whyever are you so nerved up?”

“Oh, I don’t know—”

Inside Miss Dabney’s entrance hall, to which they had been admitted by a white-aproned, very small black woman, where they were told to wait, Jonathan tried to exchange a complicitous look with Grace: after all, she was with him. But she seemed abstracted, apart.

The parlor into which they were at last led by the same small silent maid was predictably crowded—with tiny tables and chairs, with silver frames and photographs, loveseats and glassed-in bookcases. And, in the center of it all, Miss Dabney herself, yellowed white hair swathed about her head like a bandage but held up stiff and high, as though the heavy pearl choker that she wore were a splint. Her eyes, shining out through folds of flesh, were tiny and black, and brilliant. She held out a gnarled, much-jeweled hand to Grace (was Grace supposed to kiss the rings? She did not). The two women touched fingers.

When Miss Dabney spoke her voice was amazingly clear, rather high, a little hoarse but distinct. “Grace Lafferty, you do look absolutely lovely,” she said. “I’d know you anywhere; in a way you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Oh well, but you look—” Grace started to say.

“Now now. I’m much too old to be flattered. That’s how come I don’t have handsome men around me anymore.” Her glance flicked out to take in Miles, and then Jonathan. “But of course no man was ever as handsome as your daddy.”

“No, I guess—”

“Too bad your mother wasn’t pretty too. I think it would have improved her character.”

“Probably—”

Miss Dabney leaned forward. “You know, we’ve always been so proud of you in this town. Just as proud as proud.”

The effect of this on Grace was instant; something within her settled down, some set of nerves, perhaps. She almost relaxed. Miles with relief observed this, and Jonathan too.

“Yes, indeed we have. For so many, many things,” Miss Dabney continued.

A warm and pleasant small moment ensued, during which in an almost preening way Grace glanced at Jonathan—before Miss Dabney took it up again.

“But do you know what you did that made us the very proudest of all?” Quite apparently wanting no answer, had one been possible, she seemed to savor the expectation her non-question had aroused.

“It was many, many years ago, and your parents were giving a dinner party,” she began—as Miles thought, Oh dear God, oh Jesus.

“And you were just this adorable little two- or three-year-old. And somehow you got out of your crib and you came downstairs, and you crawled right under the big white linen tablecloth, it must have seemed like a circus tent to you—and you bit your mother right there on the ankle. Good and hard! She jumped and cried out, and Buck lifted up the tablecloth and there you were. I don’t remember quite how they punished you, but we all just laughed and laughed. Hortense was not the most popular lady in town, and I reckon one time or another we’d all had an urge to bite her. And you did it! We were all just so proud!”

“But—” Grace protests, or rather, she begins to protest. She seems then, though, to remember certain rules. One held that
Southern ladies did not contradict other ladies, especially if the other one is very old. She also remembered a rule from her training as an actress: you do not exhibit uncontrolled emotion of your own.

Grace simply says, “It’s funny, I don’t remember that at all,” and she smiles, beautifully.

Miles, though, who has known her for so very long, and who has always loved her, for the first time fully understands just what led her to become an actress, and also why she is so very good at what she does.

“Well of course you don’t,” Miss Dabney is saying. “You were much too young. But it’s a wonder no one ever told you, considering how famous—how famous that story was.”

Jonathan, who feels that Grace is really too old for him, but whose fame he has enjoyed, up to a point, now tells Miss Dabney, “It’s a marvelous story. You really should write it, I think. Some magazine—”

Grace gives him the smallest but most decisive frown—as Miles, watching, thinks, Oh, good.

And Grace now says, abandoning all rules, “I guess up to now no one ever told me so as not to make me feel small and bad. I guess they knew I’d have to get very old and really mean before I’d think that was funny.”

As Miles thinks, Ah, that’s my girl!

Old and famous, an acknowledged success both in this country and in his native Mexico, though now a sadhearted widower, Dr. Benito Zamora slowly and unskillfully navigates the high, sharp curves on the road to Stinson Beach, California—his destination. From time to time, barely moving his heavy, white-maned head, he glances at the unfamiliar young woman near him on the seat—the streaky-haired, underweight woman in a very short skirt and green sandals (her name is Carla) who has somewhat inexplicably invited him to come along to this party. What old hands, Benito thinks, of his own, on the wheel, an old beggar’s hands. What can this girl want of me? he wonders. Some new heaviness around the doctor’s neck and chin makes him look both strong and fierce, and his deep-set black eyes are powerful, still, and unrelenting in their judgmental gaze, beneath thick, uneven, white brows.

“We’re almost there,” he tells the girl, this Carla.

“I don’t care; I love the drive,” she says, and moves her head closer to the window, so her long hair fans out across her shoulders. “Do you go back to Mexico very often?” she turns now to ask him.

“Fairly. My very old mother still lives there. Near Oaxaca.”

“Oh, I’ve been to Oaxaca. So beautiful.” She beams. “The hotel—”

“My mother’s not in the Presidente.”

She grins, showing small, white, even teeth. “Well, you’re right. I did stay there. But it is a very nice hotel.”

“Very nice,” he agrees, not looking at her.

His mother is not the doctor’s only reason for going to Oaxaca. His interests are actually in almost adjacent Chiapas, where he oversees and has largely funded two large free clinics—hence his fame, and his nickname, Dr. Do-Good (to Benito, an epithet replete with irony, and one that he much dislikes).

They have now emerged from the dark, tall, covering woods, the groves of redwood, eucalyptus, occasional laurel, and they are circling down the western slope as the two-lane road forms wide arcs. Ahead of them is the sea, the white curve of beach, and strung-out Stinson, the strange, small coastal town of rich retirees; weekenders, also rich; and a core population of former hippies, now just plain poor, middle-aged people with too many children. In his palmier days, his early, successful years, Dr. Zamora often came to Stinson from San Francisco on Sundays for lunch parties, first as a semi-sought-after bachelor (“But would you want your daughter actually to marry …?” Benito thought he felt this question), and later, less often, with his bride, the fairest of them all, his wife, his lovely blond. His white soul. Elizabeth.

After Elizabeth died, now some five months ago, in April, friends and colleagues were predictably kind—many invitations, too many solicitous phone calls. And then, just as predictably (he had seen this happen with relatives of patients), all the attention fell off, and he was often alone. And at a time impossible for trips to Mexico: rains made most of the roads in Chiapas impassable, and he feared that he was now too old for the
summer heat. Besides, these days the clinics actually ran quite well without him; he imagined that all they really needed was the money that came regularly from his banks. (Had that always been the case? he wondered. Were all those trips to Chiapas unnecessary, ultimately self-serving?) And his mother, in her tiny stucco villa, near Oaxaca, hardly recognized her oldest living son.

Too much time alone, then, and although he had always known that would happen, was even in a sense prepared, the doctor is sometimes angry: Why must they leave him now, when he is so vulnerable? Is no one able to imagine the daily lack, the loss with which he lives?

And then this girl, this Carla, whom the doctor had met at a dinner a month or so before, called and asked him to the lunch, at Stinson Beach. “I hope you don’t mind a sort of last-minute invitation,” she said, “but I really loved our talk, and I wanted to see you again, and this seemed a good excuse.” He gratefully accepted, although he remembered very little of her, really, except for her hair, which was very long and silky-looking, streaked all shades of brown, with yellow. He remembered her hair, and that she seemed nice, a little shy; she was quiet, and so he had talked too much. (“Not too unusual, my darling,” Elizabeth might have said.) He thinks she said she worked for a newspaper; it now seems too late to ask. He believes she is intelligent, and serious. Curious about his clinics.

But in the short interval between her call and this drive a host of fantasies has crowded old Benito’s imagination. She looked about thirty, this girl did, but these days most women look young; she could be forty-two. Still a long way from his own age, but such things did happen. One read of them.

Or was it possible that Carla meant to write about him for her paper? The doctor had refused most interviews for years; had refused until he noticed that no one had asked, not for years.

“What did you say the name of our hostess was?” he thinks to ask her as they round the last curve and approach the first buildings of the town.

“Posey Pendergast. You’ve never met her?”

“I don’t think so, but the name—something goes off in my head.”

“Everyone knows Posey; I really thought you would. She’s quite marvelous.”

“Quite marvelous” is a phrase that Benito (Elizabeth used to agree) finds cautionary; those marvelous people are almost as bad as “characters.” All those groups he is sure not to like, how they do proliferate, thinks old Benito sourly, aware of the cruel absence of Elizabeth, with her light laugh, agreeing.

“I’m sure you’ll know some of her friends,” adds Carla.

Posey Pendergast is a skinny old wreck of a woman, in a tattered straw sun hat and a red, Persian-looking outfit. She breathes heavily. Emphysema and some problems with her heart, the doctor thinks, automatically noting the pink-white skin, faintly bluish mouth, and arthritic hands—hugely blue-veined, rings buried in finger flesh. “I’ve been hearing of you for years,” she tells Benito in her raspy, classy voice. Is she English? No, more like Boston, or somewhere back there, the doctor decides. She goes on. “I can’t believe we’ve never met. I’m
so
glad Carla brought you.”

“This is some house,” he says solemnly (using what Elizabeth called his innocent-Indian pose, which is one of his tricks).

It is some house, and the doctor now remembers walking past it, with Elizabeth, marveling at its size and opulence. It was right out there on the beach, not farther along in Seadrift, with the other big, expensive houses, but out in public—a huge house built up on pilings, all enormous beams, and steel and glass, and diagonal boards.

“My son designed it for me,” Posey Pendergast is saying. “Carla’s friend,” she adds, just as some remote flash is going off in the doctor’s mind: he used to hear a lot about this Posey, he recalls, something odd and somewhat scandalous, but from whom? Not Elizabeth, he is sure of that, although she was fond of gossip and used to lament his refusal to talk about patients. Did he hear of Posey from some patient? Some old friend?

This large room facing the sea is now fairly full of people. Women in short, silk, flowered dresses or pastel pants, men in linen or cashmere coats. Rich old gringos is Benito’s instant assessment. He notes what seems an unusual number of hearing aids.